Thursday, 22 April 2010

You'd have thought, given the amount of bad publicity that companies have received over the years, about their rather lackadaisical approach to your privacy, that they'd have learnt from their mistakes and started to take it a little more seriously - alas, not surprisingly, those of you thinking company x, y or z can be trusted - are very very wrong.

Lets take Tagged for example, who were sued by the FTC last year. We already know they couldn't care less about their being sued, given they continued with their little play for your contact lists, but the fact they're getting more aggressive with their little marketing ploys, is starting to annoy me somewhat.

There's also been a plethora of publicity over the past 12 months, concerning Facebook's various ploys to ensure the information you've got in your profile, gets less and less private. Then of course, there's this.

Google you'll remember, also decided it would be fun to play with your data, using their "Google Buzz", which of course, was enabled by default and launched very quietly (i.e. they didn't bother telling you) .Now it seems, Google have also been caught logging wireless LAN information, inclusive of MAC addresses, via their "Street View" vehicles.

And just to make sure they're not left out, Microsoft have ensured more bad publicity, by adding a new "feature", enabled by default of course, that shares every single bit of information on your Hotmail profile, inclusive of data on those in your Windows Live Messenger and other Windows Live, application, contacts and such. Worse of course, is that they didn't bother telling (warning) you, so you could take action to prevent their publicizing information you didn't want publicized, either for personal or business reasons.

We know businesses are out to make money, and that they'll do almost anything to make as much as possible, but this constant and increasing, stamping on your privacy, needs to be put to a stop. The "if you've got nothing to hide ....." argument just isn't good enough to allow this to continue, and it will get worse unless YOU force them to stop.